100 years of Grand Central in movies, books and TV

By ADRIENNE LAFRANCE, Digital First media

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

NEW YORK (DFM)— Grand Central Terminal, that grand Beaux-Arts behemoth in midtown Manhattan, is about to turn 100.

As with many storied landmarks, people with a particular affection for Grand Central will tell you there’s something extra magical about it — beyond the romance of train travel and the splendid chaos of arriving in New York City. Maybe it has something to do with the terminal’s place in storytelling. Grand Central has a longtime habit of appearing in made-up worlds.

In those universes, Grand Central is the place where Holden Caulfield slept on a cramped bench and the site of Lex Luthor’s underground lair. It’s the station where Cary Grant, as Roger Thornhill, fled in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” and where Al Pacino, as Carlito, hid from gun-toting pursuers in “Carlito’s Way.”

When Robin Williams’ bedraggled character in the 1991 film “The Fisher King” encounters the woman of his dreams in Grand Central Terminal, he’s so taken by the moment that he sees the commuters all around her spontaneously begin to waltz. In his love-struck imagination, the famous clock in the middle of the grand hall becomes a disco ball.

Grand Central also set the stage for romance in the television teen drama “Gossip Girl.” In the 2007 pilot episode, it’s where a lonely high-school boy sees Serena, the high-society object of his affection. Sound familiar? It calls to mind the start of Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, “House of Mirth.” It begins: “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.” Wharton’s reference is to the old Grand Central, one of two other train depots by the same name torn down to make way for the Grand Central Terminal we know today. And, yes, Von Ziegesar has cited Wharton as a source of inspiration for the “Gossip Girl” storyline.

Grand Central Terminal is where Claudia and Jamie Kincaid first arrive when they run away to New York City in the 1967 young adult classic, “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.” It’s also where a lost cricket turns up after he hops on a train in Connecticut in, “The Cricket in Times Square.” The station has popped up in everything from beloved children’s stories to the lesser known early-work of literary giant John Updike.

In real life, the keys to Grand Central were handed over to the station master on Feb. 1, 1913, and the first train chugged out of the new station just after midnight on Feb. 2, according to the Manhattan Transportation Authority. When the station first opened, it was hailed as an “engineering marvel,” and a “magnificent and princely” gift to the city. Railroads nicknamed the station “Terminal City,” describing it in advertisements of the day as “a wonderful city within a city, built for the comfort and convenience of the traveling public.”

A 1943 LIFE Magazine article described its “cathedral-like beauty,” as a place where the “flow of wartime America” was on display. During World War II, Grand Central was the place where boys said goodbye to “bravely smiling parents.” (The magazine also described hope for a future “when Grand Central Terminal will echo to the footsteps and laughter of a free, victorious people bound on swift errands of peace.”)

In 1987, the tightrope walker Philippe Petit made his way across a wire stretched 100 feet above the ground along the length of the Main Concourse while dancers performed below. ‘’The whole place is choreography all the time, with people coming and going,’’ dancer Elise Bernhardt told The New York Times that year.

You usually won’t see a tightrope walker if you look up from Grand Central’s main concourse, but you will see the famous aquamarine-green mural of the night sky, complete with gilded constellations and thousands of stars — 59 of which really light up. (The original incandescent bulbs that made the stars twinkle in 1913 have since been replaced with LED lights.)

When you gaze up at Grand Central’s version of the heavens, consider all of the other universes it has inspired.